Peripheral Vision
by MochaCocaFan
Summary: Just out of reach. Just out of sight. Motion, not detail. The strangest case the BAU has ever had. The strangest life she's lived.


It was fifteen minutes before ten o'clock on a rainy Sunday night when I spotted my prey. A young platinum-blonde girl, five foot three, carrying a black overflowing backpack and wearing jeans and a red hooded sweatshirt. Her eyes were brown in the pouring night, and I could hear her heart thud as she struggled to keep walking through the sheeting rain. She was probably a college student in this tiny university town.

I licked my lips. Delicious, though I couldn't smell her appetizing blood in this rain. No matter. I knew that this girl, whoever she was, would be absolutely satisfying. There was nothing on her person to suggest disease. I nevertheless carefully walked behind her for five minutes to hear the distinct noise of rattling pills. Nothing.

I subtly walked right next to her, fascinated by her not noticing me, as usual. The power of inattentional blindness, and the human capacity for self-deception and delusion, is amazing. I can still be surprised by how easy it is for the living exclusively to not notice me, or anything that is attached to or part of me. This is not visual invisibility- that just takes well-applied physics. People can and do subconsciously realize I'm there. They see, and do not notice or remember. It's not all fun and games- unless, of course, I turn the games on them.

I use my strength and sheer rudeness to push her path into a dark, drizzled alleyway with wet, rusting metal stairs leading to the back of an apartment that I'm currently staying in. Very easy to get in after I clean up the body a bit.

She stares directly in my face as I grab her shoulders and push her against the crying brick. The irregular sheets of filth and acid and rain, containing cigarette butts and ashes and spit, hit the back of my waterproof windbreaker. I pull her wallet out of her pocket and look at it in the near blackness.

_Christine Stein_, it reads. A sophomore undergrad at the local college. I notice for the first time as I stroke her face gently with my wet, icy, numb fingers how her skin has the remains of chemically treated acne on the bridge of the nose and fanned out over the forehead. I notice how she's wearing grape chapstick instead of lipstick. I want to kiss her mouth but refrain. No saliva getting on this girl to lead back to me.

If I let her go now, she'll head home and forget about me, literally. She'll tell anyone who asks, anyone, that she just got tired, or depressed, or that she thought she heard a noise or saw something when she headed into the alley, if they don't wait long to ask. That detail will require strong interrogation and memory aids to come out of her after she sleeps for six hours or more.

She won't remember the girl with one yellow eye and one hazel one. She won't remember my brown skin, or how cold I was. She won't remember my dark hair whose reddish tones and strands curled and waved in the rain. She won't remember how I was taller than her, or that I wore a black windbreaker and baggy black sweatpants. She won't remember my sharp, overly prominent canines, or how angry and hungry and lustful I looked.

She won't. Because she never noticed any of that in the first place.

So I push her dyed hair behind her pierced, empty ear. It has some crusty wax- an ear infection? If this were a dry night, her hair would frizz. It's still mousy brown at the neck, but not at the roots. Interesting. I lead forward, pin her elbow against the wall with my left hand. I use my right hand to wrap around her waist, so she doesn't thrash too much. My knee comes up between her legs. My feet go on top of hers. I lean up, pushing down the imported English Wellingtons. My head goes back, missing the throbbing artery in her neck. No need to spill.

I get at the right angle, open my jaw, press my fangs on her neck, and snap my mouth shut. Her whole body jerks and she shrieks instinctively like a parakeet. I suck down the boiling hot blood that goes down my dry throat so prettily. I slurp and slurp and slurp, swallow and gulp to the best of my thirsting ability. She starts to struggle, but can't bend her right elbow, and her left can't hit anywhere important. I think. She smacks me on the back, tries to reach for the head, but the rapid blood loss and pain mixed with the feeling of my knee grinding into her jeans in a circle makes her gasp and rock. Her fists clench and unclench, her knees bend weakly, her stomach moves rapidly. Her mouth is open wide, hyperventilating.

I pull away some, let the last of the deliciously salty B+ blood be pumped by her still-tough heart and not go out the healing wound in the back of her neck. I watch her die close up, watch her pretty mouth gasp and pant, watch the confusion in her eyes, watch her moan quietly as her brain releases the hallucinogenic rush that can come with intense blood loss. I watch Christine Stein die.

"Thank you." I say, laughing, and kiss her forehead dryly with my own saliva cloaked by the blood still warming my red lips. The chaste gesture of momentary love will certainly fuck with the detectives tomorrow.

I let her body slump to the ground and fall flat, crushing that blossoming face. Then I walk upstairs to my temporary apartment and read Nietzsche in a hot, sweet-smelling bath for the rest of the rainy night.

The next night when I wake up in my room, blackout curtains around the cheap bed and multiple coats of black paint on the windows barely visible through the shut blinds, my laptop's already on. Matt read my notes and sent me a location where the investigators assigned to this case are meeting. I do love that geeky, lanky hacker.

When I get into my car, a slightly modified dark green Honda with a lovely contraption in the back that pushes down the backseat to make room for the trunk, I find that he's also programmed directions into the quiet GPS with the voice of a Welsh schoolgirl. It's creepy, a little, but it's a warm fuzzy that he cared enough about me to add something so convienient.

I pull into the parking lot of the apartment building in Madison where Christine lived. There are black FBI SUVs outside. My eyebrows rise. It's strange that FBI would be here that fast. I didn't sleep an extra night, did I? Oh, crap. Now I have to do real work.


End file.
